HIPAA-COMPLIANT
PRIVATE CLOUD
DELIVERS LIFE-SAVING
MEDICAL HELP
NON-PROFIT RELIES ON AISN’S
HIPAA/HITECH-COMPLIANT PRIVATE
CLOUD TO HELP DELIVER
LIFE-SAVING MEDICAL ASSISTANCE
Who Should Read This?
CIOs, IT directors and procurement personnel tasked with
modernizing their organization’s legacy systems and moving
them to a private cloud infrastructure, while simultaneously
achieving cost savings.
The high cost of running an internal HIPAA/HITECH-compliant
data center
The hassle faced by IT staff in trying to keep up with changing
HIPAA compliance rules
Fear that downtime and data loss during a disaster would
cause irreparable damage and cost millions of dollars
Why AISN Was Selected
After methodically evaluating numerous top tier hosting providers, the client selected AISN as its HIPAA/HITECH-compliant cloud hosting provider based on AISN’s:
• Expertise in providing custom, fully HIPAA/
HITECH-compliant cloud hosting and services in a high availability environment
• Attention to detail when engineering
environments for complex applications
• Deep experience providing disaster
recovery and business continuity planning for HIPAA-compliant organizations
• Highly responsive approach to client
service (e.g., the same experts who built the solution would be readily available to step in when help was needed)
• Willingness to accommodate the client’s
budget constraints and work toward a goal of slashing the program’s operational costs by 50% or more over the next five years
• Proactivity in providing a risk assessment
analysis and HIPAA Business Associate Agreement
AISN engaged with a not-for-profit health care client that plays a heroic role in helping hundreds of thousands of citizens in need get critical medical care. Its cornerstone program for uninsured patients was successful in generating more than a quarter billion dollars per year in free assistance but depended heavily upon ‘90s-era proprietary soft-ware, tediously slow manual workflows and a processing/ approval process of up to seven days. The costs of hosting the program on premises in a HIPAA/HITECH-compliant environment and training staff to patch and maintain it were becoming onerous. Also, with no business continuity or disaster recovery plan in place, any program downtime could potentially render electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) vulnerable and prevent patients from receiving essential care.
Cut costs by
50% over the
next 5 years
Disaster recovery, low
budget, HIPAA/HITECH-
compliant, secure ePHI
THE BUSINESS
CHALLENGE
AISN and its longtime partner, a national technology consulting firm, teamed to develop a new, online portal (with automated workflows and complex, enhanced features) and deploy it in a fully HIPAA/HITECH-compliant, highly secure private cloud. From the beginning, AISN’s extremely responsive team of hosting experts dedicated themselves to the project, seamlessly becoming an extension of the client’s own IT department.
Because the portal is complex and contains sensitive electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI), a sophisticated, custom environment was required. AISN’s solu-tion is an entirely customized private cloud infrastructure employing multiple front end and database servers as well as encryption. Not only is the custom cloud fast, but it also meets the client’s needs for high availability, security, disaster resilience and cost-effectiveness. In the business continuity component, a solid cloud
backup/disaster recovery plan is now in place. AISN routinely backs up the client’s hosted environment at the primary data center and then stores the replicated copy in another geographically distant data center. In the highly-unlikely event of a
natural or man-made disaster occurring at the primary data center, the portal would experience instant failover to the alternate data center, enabling portal service to continue with virtually no downtime.
• A modern, online portal engineered for efficiency
• AISN’s HIPAA/HITECH-Compliant High Security Private Cloud
• Secure online backup and disaster recovery
• HIPAA auditing services
• Lower the total cost of ownership by
more than 50% over five years
• Simplify administration, resulting in
67% less time spent maintaining
servers & conducting audits/inventories
• Pass 100% of HIPAA/HITECH
pliance audits through enhanced security measures
• Maintain high availability, 24/7/365 • Reduce risk to business operations
by offering a proven architecture and hosting environment that’s validated for compliance, mance and reliability
• Allow for fast, efficient processing
of heavy workloads to improve productivity
• Improve business agility through rapid,
on-demand scaling and virtualization technologies that support tion (making it easy to adjust resource allocations to match workloads)
• Protect ePHI via multiple levels of
security
• Provide secure online backup and
rapid disaster recovery to prevent service interruptions
AISN also provided the
client with HIPAA auditing
services:
• A thorough security risk/vulnerability
assessment to help safeguard the portal and ePHI
• Solution testing and optimization to
lower risk and prevent implementation delays
• Extensive post-deployment consulting
on changing HIPAA compliance requirements
• Ongoing HIPAA compliance expertise
to mitigate future compliance risks
CLIENT’S SOLUTION
IS SPECIFICALLY
ENGINEERED TO:
67%
less time spent
maintaining servers &
Key Results
The new cloud-based portal helps more low income, chronically ill patients get the medical assistance they need to stay healthy. Other key results include: • By deploying the program in a fully HIPAA/HITECH-compliant cloud,
AISN empowered the client to save time and money while vastly improving its level of service.
• AISN’s deployment stayed on time and within budget. The portal
deployed smoothly in under a week with no significant capital expenditure, enabling the client to meet the project’s go-live date and focus on the design and user experience rather than the management and compliance of the cloud infrastructure.
• Optimizing the portal and private cloud for performance enhanced the
end user experience significantly. The former manual process, which used to take hours, is now easier and faster. Rather than hours, ing a single patient case takes an average of only four minutes. Further
more, case approval times have been reduced from up to a week to less than four hours.
• AISN’s private cloud solution enables the client’s business to stay up and
running in the event of a disaster or other unplanned outage.
• The client can rest assured that its hosted portal protects ePHI in full,
allowing the client to focus on the administrative aspects of compliance and enabling low-income patients to receive life-saving care.